In an otherwise unremarkable feature entitled "The "Kosovo Road' to Syria" [1] in Gulf Today, a website based in the United Arab Emirates, author Hichem Karoui succeeded in identifying the template being employed by the U.S. to effect the overthrow of the Syrian government through the time-tested combination of supporting armed insurgents on the ground while plotting a concomitant air war.

The two go hand-in-hand and the first is the necessary precondition for implementing the other.

The writer also detailed the precise models being used: Those in Afghanistan from 1978-1992 and in the Serbian province of Kosovo in 1999.

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Karoui toed the line of his state's government, that of the United Arab Emirates, which is arming and in other manners assisting the so-called Free Syrian Army in its armed uprising against the Syrian government, in no way questioning the basic assumption of the Emirati elites and their Western allies that President Bashar Assad must be forced out of office and be replaced by a regime supported by the Gulf monarchies and NATO powers.

However, he let several important cats out of the bag in his brief feature.

For example, he mentioned meeting with Burhan Ghalioun, until June 10 the president of the opposition Syrian National Council, in the Qatari capital Doha a few days earlier. Karoui asked Ghalioun, a professor of sociology at the Sorbonne in Paris, "whether it is true that there is a scenario resembling the fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan: funds from the Arabs, and weapons from the USA and its allies for the forces resisting Assad and his Russian allies?"

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His interlocutor responded with an evasive and in fact non sequitur statement, but the question was sufficient on its own merits as it contained within itself the only possible answer: The U.S. and its chief allies in the Arab world, the hereditary leaders of the Gulf Cooperation Council (Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait and Oman) are replicating the joint strategy used against the government of Afghanistan and its Soviet allies in the last quarter of the 20th century.

The Gulf monarchies, sheikhdoms and emirates are supplying the funds as well as many of the arms and recruiting foreign religious extremists as fighters; the U.S. and its NATO allies are preparing to arm anti-government forces with more advanced weaponry and train and advise them with Western special forces personnel.

As Pakistan was used as the base of operations for attacks inside Afghanistan from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, so now Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq are used for the same purpose vis-a-vis Syria.

Now that the term civil war has been used by Western and United Nations officials, a threshold has been crossed wherein the U.S. and NATO can claim to be intervening in an armed conflict between warring parties as it did in Bosnia in 1995 and in Kosovo in 1999. As an alleged disinterested third party, even as a "peacekeeping" force.

In fact, the author also stated:

"We have seen cases where wars and regime change are conducted as undercover operations, sometimes with the full knowledge of powerful Congressmen. This may happen again, not to mention the Kosovo crisis when Nato launched a military intervention against Russia's strongest objections..."

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He recalled that former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Bill Richardson recently asserted that Washington should openly enter the fray in Syria and that NATO should consider arming and training the rebels, citing the discredited canard of Russia supplying the government with attack helicopters as the impetus to do so.

Richardson told Fox News' Juan Williams, "If the Russians get in there, and there's evidence of that, I think that would be the defining step to move forward with arming the rebels."

Karoui also reminded his readers that the U.S. Senate's roving war-inciting trio of John McCain, Joseph Lieberman and Lindsey Graham visited the border of Turkey and Syria in April and met with the Free Syrian Army's General Mustafa al-Sheikh and Colonel Riad al-Asaad (the ranks they formerly held in the Syrian armed forces), with McCain issuing the following alarmist and inflammatory comment:

Rick Rozoff has been involved in anti-war and anti-interventionist work in various capacities for forty years.
He lives in Chicago, Illinois.
Is the manager of the Stop NATO international email list at:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stopnato/